Argentina

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Consumers’ appetite for live sports streamed online is continuing to create opportunities for leagues and teams around the world to expand their audiences and create new means to monetize their product. An array of sporting events from the Olympics to the Premiere League have found that audiences have grown increasingly accustomed to watching live sports online.

Pay-TV service penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean has reached 57%, according to a new report, with Argentina having more than 87% or its TV homes subscribed to a service, the most in the region.

The report, from the Organización de Telecomunicaciones de Iberoamérica (OTI), found that Puerto Rico has the next highest pay-TV penetration in the region (68%), followed by Uruguay (61%), Mexico (57%) and Costa Rica (54%).

The number of subscription video on-demand users in Latin America is expected to hit 31.81 million by 2021, a 161% increase from the 12.19 million subscribers in the region at the end of 2015. Nearly one-in-five TV households will subscribe to an OTT service, up from just 11% this year.

Despite expected strong growth in Latin American pay-TV subscriber numbers of more than 16%, revenues are forecast to grow just half as much, as competition between providers -- and from OTT services -- and bundling of home services combine to constrain video service prices.

Argentina’s state-owned communications operator Arsat and Buenos Aires-based cable company TeleCentro could be in play, with published reports saying America Movil is interested in acquiring assets from both companies.

América Móvil chief Carlso Slim reportedly has met with Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri, shopping for radio spectrum and fiber deployments that span the country.

A robust and widespread fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network is delivering some of the fastest broadband to Uruguay and Argentina, as well as some of the highest broadband penetration in Latin America, a new report contends.